Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

Tag: David Foster Wallace

  • #11: Navigating the end of year scaries

    There is a strange and unsettling feeling that happens in December, as time rushes forward and slows down all at once. And so it becomes a balancing act of sorts. Here are the kinds of things that I am personally trying to balance:

    • I have a really exciting new direction for History of the Web I’m trying to mock up right now
    • I’ve been trying to sell this damn dining room table on Facebook Marketplace (which, by the way, fuck Facebook Marketplace). It’s not going well.
    • Balancing a couple of client projects, and a fun internal one as well
    • Presents. We’re buying them, wrapping them, putting them under a tree. Trying to get ahead of it all this week.

    But anyway, I like to end the year with some focus and something new. And that energy is going to be put into what I have going on with the History of the Web right now. To mock up the site, I’ve been using WordPress’ full site editing a whole lot lately, and I want to write that up this week. The results have been… mixed, but I think it’s more liberating than it is limiting.

    The key is in the results, and I can often get bogged down in the details. Full Site Editing helps me to focus away from that and figure out solutions with what’s already there. It’s not perfect, but hey that was standing in the way of good anyway. By next month, I expect to have something out.

    I am getting to the end of reading (listening to) Bleak House. And as it all comes together in the final chapters, I’m struck by the emphasis on the power of the individual even inside an overwrought and broken down system. It is only through the compassion of John Jardynce that Ada and Esther are given a chance at all. It is only through the tenacity for truth of Mr Bucket that an innocent man does not go to jail. Sir Leicester’s final act with his wife is to forgive all, and Dickens pauses to praise this gesture:

    His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.

    Much gets stuck in the mud in Bleak House. And those that embed themselves within government and the law and all manners of buereaucracy are eventually ground down by it. But those that cut through that, and simply act out of their own goodness (Jardynce, Woodcourt, Esther, Bucket, Mrs. Bagnet, etc.) are able to advance the world forward nonetheless. And that is a powerful message.

    Just one more thing to add. Michael Silverblatt’s interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest on the former’s radio program Bookworm. Silverblatt is a fantastic interviewer and immediately interrogates Wallace on the particularities of the novels structure, which he compares to fractals, and the journey to find the message inside of the book. And Wallace quotes from a similar refrain which is that his job is not only to challenge but to entertain, so despite the labyrinth of a plot and structure, he strove to fid clarity for his readers.

    Martha Nussbaum, on Proust, and a possible explanation for why the exact matches of dating profiles so often miss anyway:

    Intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance… [Such a] cost-benefit analysis of the heart — the only comparative assessment of which intellect, by itself, is capable — is bound, Proust suggests, to miss differences of depth. Not only to miss them, but to impede their recognition. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

    Stuff fro today:

    • Read brainpickings
    • Scorecard review
    • Bleak House Notes
    • $500 in index fund
    • Comic and book lists

  • The Infinite Jest Review

    A long time ago, I read Infinite Jest and I have what amounts to complicated feelings about. I think I fall firmly into the camp of people in which the book was not transcendental or life-changing, but still impressive to behold in its scope and depth.

    As I’ve been looking back through my notes on it, I read through this review from The Atlantic that came out at the time the book was published. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, it is much simpler (in some ways) to read this book these days. Every complicated plot thread or connection or motif has been meticulously explored these days. Which is why it’s so interesting to read Sven Birkerts try and make sense of the novel at its release. He has a really clear grasp on it, and situates it as an important reflection and manifestation of the country at the turn of the century.

    But the artistic intent in Infinite Jest overrides such considerations, or at least places them in perspective. Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses. To say that the novel does not obey traditional norms is to miss the point. Wallace’s narrative structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility

    And it’s a good reminder that Infinite Jest may be important for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is that it is a perfect expression of the waywardness and uncertainty at the very tip of the 20th century.

  • Being in Time

    It’s one of those chaotic weeks. Overscheduled. A lot going on. One thing goes wrong and it all goes down like dominoes.

    And yet it’s actually kind of fun. There is a lot of joy in activity and a quickened pace. It makes me wonder that my brain’s default setting always seems to try and seize on balance and routine. It’s easy to think of David Foster Wallace’s “this is water” parable in moments like these. But also, the way Oliver . Burkeman extended that story in Four Thousand Weeks (emphasis mine):

    Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time. it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed….

    Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

    I’ll be thinking about that this week as I try to stay present. As I try to live my life and let it unfold.

    Reading

    A few articles I had some time to read.

    One was the original review of Infinite Jest in The Atlantic which offers a really fascinating perspective on the book that’s much fresher than what we have these days.

    Also, two articles that work well as a pair. Building an innovative agency (and why you might not need one) and what to do with your agency team about this whole AI thing people seem excited about. The key, it would seem, is one of those things that are painfully obvious once you see someone articulate it so clearly, as Nicholas does. You need to set up the preconditions for innovation to emerge so that when an opportunity presents itself, you are ready. Put another way, the worst time to innovate is at the exact time you want to be innovative. You should have already started.

    And I was really saddened by what Allie Nimmons had to say in her revealing and incredibly honest post about why she is leaving the WordPress community behind. It is a huge loss. Lots hit home, but especially this:

    There is a huge disconnect between the people making the “real” money with this software and the people who are trying to earn a fair living.

    Ursula K. Le Guin on what it means to write history:

    History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.

    Notes